Free The Game by A. S. Byatt Page A

plunged.
    ‘Have you been watching the telly, lately, Cass?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Would you – would you mind watching?’
    ‘If you like,’ said Cassandra. Julia could not tell whether the suggestion had pleased or displeased her; nor was she quite sure what feeling had driven her to make it. Cassandra had behaved abominably over the whole thing with Simon; and to watch him, together, at that distance beside their own fire, might neutralize some of the bad feeling; clean something up. Though anything that had had to wait so many years to be cleared up might well take more than one television rite. She stood up and switched on the set, and put out the lights.
    The picture jiggled into shape.
    ‘Don’t you hate that girl?’ said Julia. ‘All coy and routine. Having to do all that smiling. Awful job. Ugh, I
hate
her. Do you know, Cass, I’m going to be on the telly myself, on a rather highbrow sort of quiz programme thing, called
The Lively Arts.
Run by a
lovely
man called Ivan Rostrevor, who has all sorts of super ideas and loves
me
, which is always nice, isn’t it? We’re going to be a sort of panel, of all different kinds of artists, and study our different reactions to different sorts of things – Ivan wants to show how daily life affects the artists, and how the artists’ daily lives are affected by
being
artists. I mean, he might show us a film of a road accident. Or a rocket. Or children at nursery school. Or a revivalist talking about C.N.D. He’s got all sorts of ideas. He says the artist’s both different from and the same as the common man … some weeks we’re going to examine our own daily lives.…’
    Nervousness, Julia thought, is making me talk to her as I talk to people in the studio, or something. The cultured girl bent the bow of her smile for the last time on the details of the new series of broadcasts of genuine religious services.
    ‘I suppose they pay well,’ Cassandra said. Julia twisted her rings.
    Simon appeared at a distance, pushing a hollowed log canoe down a slight slope, into water that rippled and splashed. For some time he paddled silently across the screen; first across a pool of open water, then into a dark tunnel of arching creepers. Then they watched a caiman, on its bandy legs, hoist itself out of the water on to a narrow beach, where it lay, staring. Simonexplained, precisely, how it breathed – ‘the air enters the raised nostrils at the end of the snout and passes over the palate into the throat, which can be closed by a flap of mucosa. Thus, when it opens its mouth under water to seize its prey, this does not interfere with its breathing.’ He expatiated upon its teeth, which, before he had explained how one tooth slotted into the other jaw had seemed to sprout haphazardly, stump-like, all along it. ‘This is a smooth-fronted caiman: it and the dwarf caiman – the smallest alligators – appear to violate the rule that two very similar species are not found closely associated in nature. Normally, we find that some kind of “competition” for survival does appear to operate: exact studies of apparently similar species which do coexist seem to suggest that they are in some ways importantly separated – one may live in the trees, the other on the ground, one may – must – eat food entirely different from the other. And so on. In other words – except in the case of the smooth-fronted and the dwarf caimans, you will find that crocodilians in the same area are either of the same species, or so dissimilar that there is no clash of interest between them.
    ‘A naturalist,’ Simon said, as the camera held him and his caiman together in one picture, ‘has to be making constant distinctions between the individual and the species, between form and the apparent breaking of that form. Between general laws – like the one about competition – which explains certain facts, and the particular exception which may teach one something about both the law, and the species